The Athenian lawgiver behind the word draconian may have been a sacred snake
Stealing a cabbage could supposedly cost you your life under Draco's code, which is why harsh rules have been called draconian since the 18th century. Yet almost nothing is known about the man, and one historian argued that Draco was never a person at all, but a holy serpent in whose name priests issued laws.
Athenian tradition named Draco as the city's first lawgiver, active around 625 to 600 BC, and dated his code to 621 or 620 BC, under the archon Aristaechmus. His great change was to replace unwritten law and family blood feuds with written rules enforced by a court. Before, a privileged class had known and interpreted the law as it pleased; now any literate citizen could read it. The laws were displayed on wooden tablets called axones, perhaps because they turned on an axis, and were kept for almost two centuries.
The severity became legendary. Debtors of lower status than their creditors could be enslaved, and death was said to punish even petty theft. Plutarch reports that Draco, asked why, replied that small crimes deserved death and he had nothing worse for serious ones. At the same time the code made a novel distinction between murder and accidental killing. It also reportedly created a Council of Four Hundred chosen by lot, separate from the Areopagus, though Aristotle's claim that Draco extended voting rights to free men who could afford armour is judged unreliable.
Solon repealed all of it in the early 6th century BC except the homicide law. When Athens revised its laws in 409 BC, part of that homicide statute was inscribed and survives in fragments, calling itself the law of Draco. It left prosecution to the victim's relatives and punished unintentional killing with exile.
Doubts about Draco's existence persist. Karl Julius Beloch noted that drakon means serpent in Greek and that a sacred snake was worshipped on the Acropolis, so the laws might have been issued in its name and later credited to an imaginary man. Raphael Sealey observed that this would explain how a long evolution of homicide law got pinned on one figure. Most scholars still think a real Draco made laws. A folk tale in the Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda claims admirers on Aegina smothered him by showering him with cloaks and hats.
Source: Draco (legislator)
